Time to Return Power to States Over Medicaid
Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s remarks.
The President’s health spending law mandates that states implement an unprecedented expansion of Medicaid. As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of this mandate, U.S. Senators John Barrasso (R-WY), John Thune (R-SD), John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) discussed how the Medicaid mandates will bankrupt their states.
Excerpts of Senator Barrasso’s remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate:
“As a neighboring state, South Dakota and Wyoming, we work very closely together, very similar. The experiences we’re having in Wyoming where we now have a Republican governor, previously had a Democrat governor, and you talked about the Medicaid mandates, what has been called by one governor, the mother of all unfunded mandates.
“The money that then has to be used for that is, as you said, crowding out other things, and that’s money that can’t be used specifically for education.
“One of the worst things that’s happening through education across our country is the health care law, because for every penny that the state now has to add to pay for this Medicaid expansion, this unfunded mandate.
“These are astronomically large numbers. Those are dollars that aren’t going to go to the universities and the institutions of higher education as well as our additional schools throughout the state.
“So when all of a sudden if you have a student in college and you see that the tuition has gone up much more than you thought it should have, or likely think it shouldn’t go up at all, say why is it?
“Well, it’s President Obama’s health care law. That is what’s mandating money being spent for the Medicaid and the unfunded mandates so that takes the dollars away from education.
“Just this month, March, 2012, there is a report out the 2011 Actuary report on the financial outlook for Medicaid, and the figures are astonishing how this health spending law called Obamacare or the so-called Affordable Care Act, but because you call it that doesn’t mean it is affordable, as we see from this report.
“It drives up federal Medicaid costs by hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars through 2020. It forces many more people onto the Medicaid rolls.
“And, you know, the president has talked so much and used interchangeably the words ‘coverage’ and ‘care’ but what receive care as my colleague from South Dakota talked about reimbursement rates for physicians when we see how Medicaid in many ways underpays sometimes even the cost of seeing the patient, it is harder for those patients to get seen.
“So I would say the president of the United States by using those two words interchangeably, coverage and care, has, unfortunately, misled people to think that coverage equals care and we know it does not.
“And that is the concern, one of the concerns with the health care law as we talk about the broken promises and the unfunded mandates sent to the states.”
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